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Saturday, October 29, 2016

Comics Rant: Nightwing #4

Man, what's up with all these damn team ups. It's like it's assailant editors month at Marvel and DC. Ahem. Nightwing and Raptor finally decided that it's time to make their move against the newly reformed Court of Owls. Not bad, it only took four issues to get around to this going down. If this was a Bendis book, you just know that motherfucker would have drawn it out to issue sixty.

The breaking point comes when they both decided it time to free the hobo families that they brought to the Court for sacrifice back in the second issue. They free the folks and then turn to hold off the head of the Court of Owls. He's taken the same DNA altering drugs that Nightwing and Raptor found the Kobra operatives using from issue #1. If you don't know what I'm taking about, that means you haven't been following my rants and if you haven't, shame on yo ass.

The leader of the Court of Owls has used that gene splicing technology to become, you guessed it, a giant owl. Yeah, I know. Very original. But kudos to Javier Fernandez for making it look cool on a comic book page. Raptor stays behind with his "injury" to let Nightwing get away and save the hostages. How very DC of him. Next, he'll be yelling about holding the line at $2.99.

Nightwing does the hero thing and saves the people and then returns to Gotham to a "Job well done" from Robin. Then a nice sit down with his boss, Batman. Who clearly thinks that Raptor is a bad guy and Dick should have nothing to do with him. Nightwing gets all uppity and reads Bats the riot act. He says Raptor isn't bad because he trust him and they saved people. Plus, Nightwing for the billionth time tells Batman he's not like him. Damn, Nightwing, you sound like a broken record.

Nightwing storms off, but at the end we learn that surprise, suprise, Raptor is a damn double agent. He's really working behind the scenes for Kobra and is slowly working to gain Nightwing's trust, so he can, you know, kill him. Well, that and maybe steal his ATM PIN number. Which could have been a hell of a whole lot quicker if he just knifed the motherfucker in the back. So I guess we get a few more issues of this slow burn story. Meh. Some parts were pretty cool, like the he action but some parts like the story felt a little formulaic. Would have been a much bigger shock if Raptor didn't let the reader in on his plan. Just saying.